at least we are heading in the right direction finally. May i suggest that Bioware actually listen to the feedback people give them on PTS? the number of people that told them of the likely frosty reception (i'm being generous) of GC is significant, they thought they knew better. an ops boss every few months is a gigantic indicator that they are totally unprepared for group content going into 5.x,and figured a bunch of cheap recycled flashpoints would fox the players into thinking they are actually doing something. They are rushing unfinished content out no doubts about it. This is actually their best option in the dire situation they placed themselves, so I actually welcome it (seasoned developers will be squirming in their seats at this plan - rightly so, its a bad one, but their best available). Notes for Bioware managment for the future: * no more vanity projects like Galactic Command & DvL * actually listen to PTS feedback and develop far enough in advance so you can actually fix things that need fixing. * MMO's need ALL forms of content, you cant focus on youre favourite one and ignore the rest * One of you has a gambling fixation. Stop forcing it on the playerbase and seek counselling.

an operation in any shape is better than none, so i'm less pissed than is was. Still you have to ask the question what the hell have they been doing with their budget all this time? smaller less profitable mmo's produce more content than these guys. this isn't a case of "job-done, they like us again" but rather they avoided the guillotine this time... must do better in future. time to buck your ideas up Bioware.

it's youre money. Personally this is part of the problem, its one of the highest grosing MMO's and the the one with the least development. they got fat and stupid on cartel payments and throw their dev budget on stuff they want (DvL, GC,cheap recycled 4 man content, bypassing QC), not what the players wanted. At any point in the last 2 years they could have listened to the player base but chose not to. Now people are tearing them a new one. Feeding them easy cartel cash isnt going to learn them. They'll just go "phew, people love us again. I got this great idea for random packs for 6.0 - it'll be fine only doing a new operation every 3 years".

alot of people say in the forums they dont care, dont listen and despise all the pve primadona whining about ops. None of that sentiment ever came from Bioware as far as i know, and I really really hope Bioware do not hate ops moaning. The guys moaning about ops have spent over 2 years hanging on in a herculean act of faith in Bioware, in other games that level of grit and belief would be praised. I lead a progression team for a number of years (up until end of 3.x), once it was announced that there were no new ops for 4.x an apocaliptic wave of quitting raiders and despirited GM's had big name guilds toppling like dominoes . They were depressed because 3.0 had only 2 raids at the start and a year later at 3.x end there was nothing more and nothing announced next year either. That first wave waited a year, that was showing alot of grit. In what other game would you wait a year for a release. in November (month before 5.0) a second smaller wave (less pve guilds left) of guilds transferred to WoW or just disbanded. Official release said nothing about ops and their hearts couldnt take the despair 2 years hanging in and holding on gone. The guys screaming for new ops now didnt go with the others, have clung on against all hope because they want to believe Bioware didnt want to desert them, still believe Bioware doesnt want to desert them. Thats damn heroic levels of belief in my view ... treat them kindly in the forums.

yeah - a clue or alert would be a great way to remove the wild goose chase elements. We found that while we could do it... it too ktoo long to locate, wasnt fun to fight and actually mentioning DvL was enough to depress the guildies so much they lost the will to play.

yup not hard - 16 random people in 220/224 can apply brute force repeatedly till tokens fall out.

it also requires finding them - we gave it a go (very big pve guild) withour trusty maps from Dulfy of known spawns, theres too many potential spawn points and all were not even known - we found one after alot of searching but that was only because it was bugged and didnt despawn. after a bunch more goes (light perma wining means you get to try many many times in a day) we found a real one, but it wasnt fun. too much hunting around or standing in fields waiting for something that might never come. It had potential DvL but it current incarnation - broke. Naturally server populations do what they always do when rewards are dangled in front of them, switch to the side that gets the tokens. there was a massive switch to the light side of dark characters. If the mechanisms that were meant to stop one side always perma winning worked, this wouldnt have happened. Now those mechanisms have to dea lwith the fact that dark side is totally inactive on our sever much like yours. Maybe the mechanism that was meant to make it consecutively harder for the last winning side to win again is bugged and makes it harder for the other side? who knows. But the interesting thing with our server/population is Imperial was thought to be more active in conquest. The net result is that the server population polarises to the dominant side after a a few days (dark side alts get mothballed or convert when light is perma dominant).

Get ready for more of this guys over the next few months: servers polarising to one side over the other and players either swapping alignment in desperation or switching server. Of course the more player switch the worse it gets, eventually one of the servers which isnt all lightside like the others may end up as all dark side. It's not what the developers intended, but its what you get when you apply Ilum Open world PvP levels of naivety to the design of global competition. But dont worry, Bioware will monitor the situation, then realise its too late to fix.

Star Wars: The Old Casino

strangely, those three items would be preferable to the last three things RNG gave me in a Command pack.

True, but from what I see the forums on this issue are very much indicative of what people are saying outside the forums. The complaints here are widely held in the real in-game population.

This. You are being a good GM though, the community should give you a big thankyou. Servers are obviously going to shut down, Bioware need to write some scripts to transfer a guilds holding in preparation (which are substantial now) i.e. Guild bank - with expensive unlock of tabs (cost many creds) Guild Ship + unlocked rooms - cost many years of encryption grinding. Blood sweat and tears go into this Guild Strongholds - cost multiple fortunes to unlock Guild's decorations roster - irreplaceable for some guilds... go look at the deco prices on GTN, we have 1st Grand Mandalore statue which cannot be replaced in any way

I'm sure the devs are big boys and girls and understand that people get upset when they drop the ball so comprehensively. They are professionals, or I assume they are professionals. It's not like the reaction was unexpected - the beta testers no doubt told them it was not a smart idea, the community told them it was not a smart idea when they announced it. If they hadnt been living in a self imposed bubble of secrecy we could have told them how not smart it was earlier even. It wasnt a smart idea when they did a very similar system in 1.0 release, it wasnt a smart idea when their competitors tried it (but with actual content to sweeten the pill). They are grown ups and should be able to take responsibility for ignoring all the big red flashing lights and plowing ahead anyway. I believe they had ample time to mentally prepare themselves.

crafting is very viable if you got access to a HM ops group for the 234 schematics (we do, few else will be so fortunate). It rather emphasises how stupid the new loot system is if you cant rely on it for loot - loot systems are meant to provide that you know waste of developers time and budget? how many operations or flashpoints could have been provided if they hadnt bothered or did some basic research/design.

Thank you for the kind offer. But i shall decline Why on earth would i waste my time grinding for garbage crates.

wonder if the coming soon content is more uprisings?

it should be movable in the interface editor, i moved mine as it was hiding under the minimap by default

and did he get any set pieces in those first 100 boxes? from what ive seen of the garbage thats been dropping it's an important question

indeed there needs to be both the will for a 6.0 from both the players and Bioware. I loved this game when it was good but i do feel like they just farmed my belief in them.

^^ this I had high hopes and things were looking really good for 2.x & 3.x but then they figured what all mmo players actually want is single player story only. would have been great if they still did the mmo content. I held on for a very long time because i refused to believe they werent working on actual mmo content (it made totally no sense to not work on it). But after a 2nd year of no actual mmo content its clear they arent interested. Story is awesome but thats only the welcome mat for an mmo, the real content is after you finish that.

thanks for the reply. For DvL, They actually promised that there was already a mechanic to make it impossible for one side to totally dominate the other in the live dev stream about it. It' just doesnt exist or is non-functioning. they even gave an example of saying if theres a server with 1 DS player and everyone else LS, DS would eventually win. after i dont know 80 successive wins for LS on the european servers its already having a catastrophic effect of the population (DS'ers switching to LS enmasse to avoid gearing slower, DS'ers unsubbing after completing the story). It's nearly as big an issue as the CXP over here.

Yup. But after opening a number of command crates i can say it's not just Pay to Win though, it's Pay to Loose too

Hi all, I'm a very long time player and very active community member, never posted (never felt I needed to) before the 5.0 debacle. I totally understand all the venting and i'm venting myself, i may not even be done with my venting. But i think its better to focus on constructive solutions, see if that actually elicits any more response from the dev team. We wont get anywhere if they feel they have to hide under the table until the new year. 4.X wasnt perfect, there were things that needed fixing and improving, and like all mmo's it did need a flow of new group content as the old (and good) was 2 years ago. 5.0 had one great feature, the story - we all agree on that and congratulate the story team and voice actors on an outstanding job. The other features were very poorly thought through, i'll leave it there as all the other threads cover the detail way better. We can just roll back to the last 4.x build pretty easily - we know it exists we saw it last week Constructively speaking 4.X had many advantages over the current build: The drops dropped from the related content and were immediate rewards, you saw it, you may not win it but you saw the carrot and knew it existed. Guilds quickly organised to save people from awful pug groups and used master looter to ensure everyone got a fair share of the spoils. An 8 man group could form up and run 2 operations back to back and each participant would get 1 guaranteed token drop. Very egalitarian, non-random & non-grindy. No constant DvL spam. Conquest happened and those that didnt partake or like it could totally ignore it without feeling that they were being victimised with penalties to keep up with the community (yes i know DvL doesnt penalise cxp, but a 15% bonus to everyone else does equate to a 15% penalty on you) or feeling they must conform to the other players alignment choices. I wont say choices mattered, but you could play it you're way without penalty. no pay to win. Bioware kept clear of the temptation to monetise the end game, the competitive side of the mmo. The community had long appreciated that and this helped with player loyalty substantially. f2p/pref were not entirely excluded from the end game. They were able to pay to do the end game content they wanted with ops passes. This suited the casual player market much better than a subscription did or ever will. It also gave an option to players leaving the game to come back at a later date. Classes were balanced in its final incarnation, bioware put alot of work into slowly fixing most imbalances over it's time. Balance is good, it keeps the game fun. I'm sure the developers dont intend to drive off large portions of their player base (particularly not the part that buys insane amounts of hypercrates and keeps the game in profit... hint... they play ops too you know). 5.0 can be rehabilitated with much time, development work and new content, but alot of players are not going to be prepared to pay for it during that period so why not get there quicker by rolling back to good old 4.x and then patch in the good bits from the new release. 5.0 story, lovely. Yes please, patch it straight into the pvp mission materials crate - that was great, we can keep that too. uprisings? 4.x still has the same bosses in the original flashpoints so this wouldnt need to be a priority to bring back. only if you got people without more important tasks Thank you for you're time.

they are quick and fun ... but the boss fights are cut & paste from the flashpoints so theres nothing new here. expect lots more though because they are cheaper to produce than ops or actual flashpoints.

oh and the dev livestream will determine whether i stay subbed past that.